Always the Princess, Never the Queen

82 Pages·2016·0.88 MB·English

Always the Princess,
Never the Queen
Female authority figures in movie adaptations
of fairy tales

Name: Sarah Danz (s4041232)
E-mail: [email protected]

Supervisor: dr. M.P.J. Sanders
Examinor: dr. T.M.J. Sintobin
Date: 27-06-2016
Abstract
Sprookjesadaptaties hebben veel bekende conventies; het is een genre waarin prinsessen,
prinsen, heksen, en magie een rol spelen en waarin de hoofdpersoon altijd nog ‘lang en
gelukkig’ leeft. Een van de conventies is het stereotype van de goede maar passieve prinses
tegenover de slechte, machtige koningin. In sprookjesadaptaties schijnt autoriteit voor
vrouwen inherent verbonden te zijn aan slechtheid. In recente adaptaties lijkt dit echter te
veranderen; prinsessen worden actiever en koninginnen worden niet meer neergezet als puur
slecht. In deze scriptie onderzoek ik of deze stereotypen daadwerkelijk aan het veranderen
zijn. Mijn onderzoeksvraag is: Hoe zijn het prinses- en koninginstereotypen aan het
veranderen in hedendaagse filmadaptaties van sprookjes? Mijn hypothese is dat, hoewel het
op het eerste gezicht lijkt dat de stereotypen aan het veranderen zijn, bij nadere analyse
prinsessen nog steeds passieve personages zijn, terwijl autoriteit vooral voorbehouden is voor
slechte, vrouwelijke personages.
Om mijn onderzoeksvraag te beantwoorden heb ik 6 films geanalyseerd, verdeeld in 3
casussen. In mijn eerste casus heb ik gekeken naar traditionele adaptaties; Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs (1937) en Sleeping Beauty (1959). In mijn tweede casus heb ik gekeken naar
twee recente geanimeerde adaptaties: Tangled (2010) en Frozen (2013). In mijn laatste casus
heb ik gekeken naar twee recente ‘live-action’ adaptaties: Maleficent (2014) en Snow White
and the Huntsman (2012). Van deze casussen heb ik kort een objectbeschrijving gegeven.
Daarna heb ik ze geanalyseerd met behulp van het actantieel model van Algirdas Greimas, om
de veranderende rollen van vrouwelijke autoriteitsfiguren in adaptaties te analyseren en de
casussen met elkaar te kunnen vergelijken. Daarnaast heb ik Susan Lanser’s concept van
‘discursive authority’ uit het boek Fictions of Authority gebruikt om zowel de autoriteit die
personages zelf claimen, als de autoriteit die ze verkrijgen of verliezen door interactie te
analyseren. Ik heb hierbij drie categorieën gehanteerd die Lanser gebruikt als definitie van
‘discursive authority’: intellectuele geloofwaardigheid, ideologische validiteit, en esthetische
waarde.
Uit mijn onderzoek bleek dat, hoewel er zeker aspecten binnen de stereotypen aan het
veranderen zijn, mijn hypothese niet helemaal ontkracht kan worden. Vooral nieuwe
animatieadaptaties bleken een complexer en genuanceerder beeld te geven van vrouwelijke
autoriteitsfiguren, terwijl de ‘live-action’ adaptaties, die juist een duisterdere sfeer neerzetten
en gericht zijn op een volwassen publiek, meer teruggrijpen op een traditioneel,
eendimensionaal beeld. Hoewel deze adaptaties wel spelen met de bekende conventies, waren
het vooral de animatieadaptaties die op een dieper niveau deze conventies veranderden.

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Contents
Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. 1
Contents ............................................................................................................................................ 2
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Fairy tales and the princess and queen stereotypes ....................................................................... 7
Theoretical framework ................................................................................................................ 12
Case 1: The Traditional Princesses and Queens ........................................................................ 16
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) .................................................................................. 16
Sleeping Beauty (1959) ............................................................................................................... 22
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 28
Case 2: New Animation ................................................................................................................ 30
Tangled (2010) ............................................................................................................................ 30
Frozen (2013) ............................................................................................................................. 37
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 45
Case 3: Live Action Adaptations ................................................................................................. 48
Maleficent (2014) ........................................................................................................................ 48
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) ........................................................................................ 55
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 63
Analysis and Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 65
Actantial level ............................................................................................................................. 65
Authority ..................................................................................................................................... 67
Discursive level ........................................................................................................................... 69
Genre ........................................................................................................................................... 70
Gender ......................................................................................................................................... 72
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 75
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................... 79
Appendix 1 ...................................................................................................................................... 81

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Introduction
On January 25, 2016, The Washington Post published an article based on the preliminary
findings of a project to analyze all the dialogue from the Disney princess franchise done by
linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer. These preliminary findings were surprising;
looking at the percentage of words spoken, the division between men and women turned out
to be more balanced in the ‘classic’ princess movies (Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping
Beauty) than in films from the ‘90s. Furthermore, when looking at the number of speaking
roles, more recent princess films have larger casts, but also more lopsided ones.1 However,
the objection was immediately made, for example by journalist Darlena Cunha on the website
of Time, that looking at movies from this perspective does not take into account the roles
women play in films.2
Looking at the roles women play in fairy tale adaptations, they mostly seem to be royalty,
but never good ruling sovereigns. In their stories there is often a king who is the ruling
monarch or at the end of the story the princess marries, making her husband the next in line to
rule; of the eleven princesses in the current Disney Princess merchandise line-up (2016), ten
have a love-interest in their principal movie, three marry at the end of their story, three are
officially engaged and two are implied to get married by telling us ‘they lived happily ever
after’. Only two ‘princesses’ by birth are not set up to be married at the end of their stories:
Pocahontas and Merida.3
Whereas the Disney princesses thus do not become rulers, the word ‘queen’ in fairy tale
adaptations has inextricably become tied to the word ‘evil’. Women with authority are either
portrayed as loving (and often deceased) mothers, or as powerful antagonists.4 Especially
through Disney’s first three princess-movies (Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty),
the stereotype of an innocent, pretty heroine persecuted by an evil female villain has become
reinforced.5
However, these stereotypes are not static. Just as the fairy tales of which they are part,
they depend on transformation for survival.6 The stories and thus the stereotypes within them

1 Guo, Jeff. (2016) ‘Researchers have found a major problem with ‘The Little Mermaid’ and other Disney movies.’, in: The
Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/25/researchers-have-discovered-a-major-
problem-with-the-little-mermaid-and-other-disney-movies/ (20-05-2016).
2 Cunha, Darlena. (2016) ‘The Point of a Disney Princess Isn’t Her Talking Time.’, in: Time.
http://time.com/4196181/disney-princesses-talking-time/ (20-05-2016).
3 See appendix 1 for more information.
4 Wohlwend, Karen (2009) ‘Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts through Disney Princess
Play’, in: Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 57-83: 59.
5 Stone, Kay. (1975) ‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us’, in: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 88, No. 347, pp. 42-
50: 44.
6 Warner, Marina. (2014) Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. Oxford: Oxford University Press: xxii.

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need to be altered in order to fit new audiences and/or a medium, so that the stories can be
retold in a way that is relevant for the current society.7 While this altering of the stories, which
causes them to differ from the ‘original’, is sometimes criticized, it also causes contemporary
adaptations to illustrate changes in society’s attitudes.8
Looking at the stereotype of the princess and the evil queen, it seems a shift is taking
place. More and more adaptations show the princess being active and authoritative, and give
the nemesis more background and understanding. But are these stereotypes really changing?
As Warner notes in her book Once Upon a Time, new fairy tale adaptations like Tangled
answer the demand for positive female role models by showing an upbeat, spirited, and
physically vigorous heroine but still cast the blame on an older female authority figure.9 So
are the stereotypes really changing, or do the appearances of contemporary fairy tale
adaptations deceive? My research question is: How are the princess and queen stereotypes
changing in contemporary movie adaptations of fairy tales? My hypothesis is that, while on
the surface princesses are more active and the queens’ persona’s are more elaborated, it still
stands that princesses are passive and authority is reserved for the evil female characters.
My research consists of a short introduction and three case studies. In the introduction, I
will briefly look into the history of fairy tales, the princess and queen stereotype and the role
the Walt Disney Company played in this. I will also briefly go into my theoretical frame. I
will use the actantial narrative schema developed by Algirdas Greimas to analyze if and what
is changing in the role princesses and queens play in the adaptations. The actantial model will
help me get a hold on the different adaptations and will make it manageable to compare them.
Furthermore, this theory will allow me to compare the stereotypes not just on a discursive and
narrative level, but also in their most basic structure. However, as Vladimir Propp also notes
in the introduction of his book Morphology of the folktale, structural analysis is a beginning,
but not an end in itself.10 It can be a good starting point, but should not be seen without
context as a neutral truth. This structural analysis will give me the input I need, which I will
then interpret and contextualize using gender/feminist narratology, which shows the crucial
role gender plays in the construction and interpretation of text.11 In this, I fall in line with
Susan Lanser who, in her book Fictions of Authority, converges the approaches of formalist
and feminist narratology into a sociological poetics, which enables her to “see narrative

7 Davis, Amy. (2007) Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation. London: John Libbey
Publishing: 13.
8 Ibidem: 12.
9 Warner (2014): 142.
10 Propp, Vladimir. (1968) Morphology of the folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press: xiii.
11 Herman, Luc & Bart Vervaeck. (2005) Vertelduivels. Nijmegen: Vantilt: 133.

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technique not simply as a product of ideology but as ideology itself.”12 Thus, this theoretical
framework allows me to analyze the rending of female authority figures as an embodiment of
the “social, economic, and literary conditions under which it has been produced.”13
In her book, Lanser defines discursive authority as “the intellectual credibility, ideological
validity, and aesthetic value claimed by or conferred upon a work, author, narrator, character,
or textual practice.”14 Lanser mostly focuses on female authors and their self-authorization,
their “quest for discursive authority” by writing and seeking to publish a work.15 However,
her definition of discursive authority states that this authority can also be claimed by or
conferred upon a character, meaning that the quest for discursive authority, “a quest to be
heard, respected, and believed, a hope of influence”, can also be undertaken by a character.16
This enables me to use this framework to analyze fictional authority figures and how their
authority is constituted.

Using this theoretical framework, I will make an object-description and analysis of three
different types of cases. In selecting my cases, I first decided to focus on Western fairy tale
adaptations, since these adaptations have become widely known all over the world.
Furthermore, my own prior knowledge of Western fairy tales, being a Western person myself
and growing up with these tales, will help me reach a deeper understanding of the subject. Of
course, this does also mean I will have to tackle my own assumptions.
In the first case, I will look at some of the ‘traditional princesses and queens’, meaning the
adaptations of fairy tales showcasing stereotypes which through growing literacy and widely
known adaptations by Disney have become universal phenomenon.17 As Warner states it,
reproductions of personas like the Evil Queen from Snow White (1937) have become so
imprinted, that this has become the standard.18 Thus, I will analyze Snow White (1937) and
Sleeping Beauty (1959), which are movies from Disney’s ‘Classic period’ (1937-1966, during
Walt Disney’s lifetime) and which show the famous classic passive fairy tale princesses for
which Disney has gained its reputation.19 Both movies also feature an older, powerful, evil,
female authority figure as nemesis; the Evil Queen and Maleficent, also known as Mistress of
All Evil.

12 Lanser, Susan. (1992) Fictions of Authority. Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca; London: Cornell University
Press: 5.
13 Ibidem: 5.
14 Ibidem: 6.
15 Ibidem: 7.
16 Ibidem: 7.
17 Meder, Theo (red). (2013) Van kikvors tot droomprins. De wording van het sprookje. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren: 121.
18 Warner (2014): 165.
19 Davis (2006): 9.

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In my second case I will look into the two most recent animated fairy tale adaptations
which feature female authority figures: Tangled (2010) and Frozen (2013). While Brave
(2012) is more recent than Tangled, it was not an adaptation of a classic fairy tale. Both
adaptations show an active princess and especially Frozen is an interesting case study because
it is the first Disney animated fairy tale that shows a princess becoming a queen without
finding a love-interest first. While Tangled does not feature an evil queen, it does feature an
older, evil female in a position of authority.
In my third case I will look at contemporary live action adaptations of fairy tales. I will
analyze Maleficent (2014) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). Maleficent is an
adaptation of the story of Sleeping Beauty, giving more emphasize to the female nemesis and
explaining her motives. Snow White and the Huntsman is an example of an adaptation in
which the princess becomes more active and stalwart. Furthermore, by analyzing these cases I
will analyze live-action adaptations of the traditional adaptations mentioned before.

Most fairy tale research up till now has focused on older adaptations of fairy tales. Van
kikvors tot droomprins (2013) under editorship of Theo Meder looks at the ‘becoming’ of the
fairy tale, but explicitly does not look into recent productions.20 Once Upon a Time (2014) by
Marina Warner doesn’t focus on Western fairy tales but gives a concise and complete history
of fairy tales that can function as a useful background in this research. The same goes for The
Irresistible Fairy Tale (2012) by Jack Zipes, in which he presents a cultural and social history
which explains why fairy tales were created and retold.
Good Girls and Wicked Witches (2007) by Amy Davis focuses specifically on Disney
heroines, but restricts itself to animated movies, excluding the new live-action adaptation and
adaptations by other production companies. Other research, like the article Damsels in
Discourse (2009) by Karen Wohlwend, places princess stereotypes in relation to children and
examines the effect on children. In my research, I will restrict myself to examining the
cultural products and I will not address the effect the stereotypes have on the audience, since a
lot of research has already been done in this direction and it does not add to my research.
Research like mentioned above forms a good basis on which to look into the new
adaptations and the changing types and in my thesis I will use this in a literary analysis to
provide my findings with context. Looking at the existing literature, it becomes clear that
there are some gaps in the current field of fairy tale studies that my thesis can complement.
Not only has little research been done on contemporary fairy tale adaptations, most of the

20 Meder (2013): 8.

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focus of gender-related research has been on the princesses. Other authority figures like the
stereotype of the evil queen have been underexposed. However, instead of solely focusing on
the evil queens, I decided that it is the relation between the two stereotypes, their shared
change, and the comparison between the two that makes this subject interesting and offers an
unique perspective.
As Zipes addresses in his introduction of the book Don’t Bet on the Prince (1986), some
feminist criticism of fairy tales is very reductionist and limited, focusing mainly on negative
features of the tales.21 An example he names is Woman Hating (1974) by Andrea Dworkin,
which describes and theorizes oppression of women, among others in fairy tales. In this
research, I strive to be as critical as possible without becoming too reductionist. I will thus use
sources like this with caution.

Fairy tales and the princess and queen stereotypes
No aspect of Disney’s fairy tale adaptations has been so consistently criticized as the changes
that made the stories differ from the ‘original’ versions. 22 Especially the fact that the new
versions were perceived as ‘sanitized’ versions evoked resistance.23 Examples of this
sanitation are Sleeping Beauty, in which no mention is made of the fact that in Basile’s
version the princess is raped and gives birth to twins in her sleep, or of the Ogress mother-in-
law who wants to eat the princess and her two children from Perrault version. Another
example is The Little Mermaid, in which the mermaid magically loses her voice and marries
the prince, instead of having her tongue cut out by the sea witch and the prince marrying
someone else, as Andersen’s version describes. However, this calls into question what the
‘original’ version of a story is. For those who grew up in the past century, Disney’s portrayal
of the stories has become so imprinted that those are considered to be the ‘classics’. And even
if a specific version of a fairy tale is seen as classic, this does not make them static. As Jack
Zipes states in his book The Irresistible Fairy Tale, fairy tales “are constantly re-created and
reformed, and yet remain mimetic because of their relevant articulation of problematic issues
in our lives.”24 The fairy tales as we know them today are rooted in oral tradition.25 Stories

21 Zipes, Jack. (1986) Don’t Bet on the Prince. Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Gower:
Gower Publishing Company Limited: 5-6.
22 Davis (2006): 12.
23 Warner (2014): 132.
24 Zipes, Jack. (2012) The Irresistible Fairy Tale. The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton: Princeton
University Press: 20.
25 Ibidem: 2.

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were told to communicate knowledge and experience.26 Altering the story was an essential
part of the function of the storyteller, who used stories as a ‘teaching tale’ and altered aspects
as to make the story relevant for the audience.27 With the recording of fairy tales in print, the
stories thus lost some of their cultural fluidity that was essential for its teaching capacity.28
However, even in recorded form fairy tales continue to be altered. The collectors and writers
like Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, who formed a corpus of fairy tales which marked the
start of modern fairy tale as we know it, already adapted the stories they collected to their own
ideas.29 For example, Wilhelm Grimm censored stories in such a way that women were
blamed and heroines’ parts became smaller, while actions of men were excused and boys got
more to do.30 It is important to note that all the universally known collections of fairy tales
were collected by men. Thus, our notion of female protagonists has been shaped by male
collectors of the 18th and 19th century. The general patriarchal view of that time placed
women mostly in domestic positions, serving the interests of men.31 Stories that featured
heroines that were assertive and courageous simply did not fit this view and were thus not
selected by the collectors, or they were adapted.
Thus, the versions of the stories by the Grimm Brothers were already censored,
polished, reshaped versions. Eventually, these versions traveled the world, became known as
classics, and defined fairy tales all over the world.32 Thus, the question of the ‘original’
becomes unanswerable. Luckily for my research this does not pose a problem, since I will
take the cultural products as a starting point. The history of older versions will thus only play
a part in the context of the product.
In her book, Amy Davis calls Walt Disney “probably the closest thing the twentieth-
century produced to a teller of national (and international) folk stories.”33 While this research
does not exclusively focus on Walt Disney and his company, his influence in contemporary
adaptations of fairy tales is gigantic and deserves some separate attention.
The Disney Brothers Studio was founded in 1923 and changed its name to Walt
Disney Productions in 1926.34 After producing the reasonably successful series of live-
action/animated shorts Alice Comedies, the company’s first big success was the all-animated
series featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. However, in 1928 Disney lost most of his

26 Zipes (2012): 2
27 Davis (2006): 11-12.
28 Ibidem: 12.
29 Warner (2014): 49/50.
30 Ibidem: 135.
31 Zipes (2012): 80
32 Warner (2014): 60.
33 Davis (2006): 10.
34 Ibidem: 73.

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animation staff and the Oswald trademark to Universal Pictures, which had distributed the
series. Mickey Mouse was created and Walt decided to produce an animated short with
synchronized sound: Steamboat Willie. While this was not the first sound cartoon, the heavy
reliance on synchronized sound effects set it apart.35 The company was unique in wanting
animators to have artistic training and in facilitating art classes.36 Because of this, the
company could produce more realistic, higher-quality animation with a more sophisticated
storyline.37 This eventually led to Walt’s decision to produce a feature-length cartoon, which
was unheard of because of the time and money involved.38 The film industry even dubbed the
project ‘Disney’s Folly’. However, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became hugely
successful and urged Disney on to release more animated features.39
The make-up of Walt Disney Company during this time was very male-dominated.
While a lot of women were employed by the company, they mostly worked in departments
that were low in status, like the ink-and-paint department.40 While Walt himself stated that
women could contribute something in the business that men never would or could, it wasn’t
until the period 1989-2005 that the make-up started shifting in favor of a greater presence of
women in upper-level positions.41
The way women are portrayed in Disney’s movies has not always been a point of
critique. While the portrayal of women in movies from the ‘Classic period’ is now often
critiqued for its classic passive fairy tale princesses stereotype, in its own time no objection
seems to have been raised, as Davis notes from an analysis of a survey done by McCall’s
magazine in 1967.42 However, in the post-war period, women rose up against the sanitizing,
stereotyping, and beauty queen fantasies of the movies. The roles of evil female authority
figures however, like the evil queens or stepmothers, were not changed and thus left
unchallenged.43 After the feminist protests of the Seventies, film companies commissioned
women screenwriters to write heroines which answered the demand for more positive role
models.44 However, this did not immediately signal big changes in the portrayal of women by
Disney. From her analysis of the ‘Middle Era’, from 1967-1988, Davis concludes that any
feminist themes in Disney animation were carefully contained within conservative forms, for

35 Davis (2006): 79.
36 Ibidem: 80.
37 Ibidem: 87.
38 Ibidem: 90.
39 Ibidem: 90.
40 Ibidem: 113.
41 Ibidem: 170.
42 Ibidem: 135.
43 Warner (2014): 132-133.
44 Ibidem: 142.

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